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The increasing body of research work in the area of language teacher beliefs shows that this research domain has been of particular interest and now well-established (Borg, 2006). One question that arises is that teachers’ beliefs in general are too broad to conceptualise and investigate. In fact, recent research work has seen the increasing popularity of studies that specifically address the question raised more than two decades ago by Pajares (1992) about the need to investigate teachers’ beliefs about specific aspects of their work, such as grammar instruction (e.g., Burgess & Etherington, 2002; Canh, 2011), communicative language teaching (e.g., Sato & Kleinsasser, 1999), and codeswitching (e.g., Barnard & McLellan, 2014). However, little research has been carried out into teachers’ beliefs regarding Taskbased Language Teaching (TBLT), and none has been done in the context of Vietnam, a context where the current curriculum and accompanying textbooks are claimed to adopt TBLT as the principal teaching method. This qualitative case study uses a number of data collection methods, including audio-recorded lesson planning sessions, classroom observation, stimulated recall, and focus groups. The findings show that there is a significant gap between teachers’ current beliefs, intention, practices and the general principles of TBLT identified in the literature. The findings have implications for pedagogy and research not only in the Vietnam, but also in relatable contexts.

This study aims to examine how English-medium instruction policy in an EFL context is interrelated with L2 motivation and achievement of the students taking a college English speaking course. The data consisted of 88 Korean college students’ questionnaire responses, final scores in an English speaking course, and qualitative interviews with 8 students. The findings indicated that the students had higher extrinsic motivation than intrinsic motivation. Participants’ perception of contributions of foreign instructors and of the English-medium instruction has been examined as the two subscales of the learning context under English-medium instruction policy, which engendered high scores. Whereas these contextual factors had significant correlations with achievement in speaking, motivation was found to have no direct correlation with the achievement. The results corroborate the roles of the learning context in the learning process as motivational subscales affect achievement through their interplay with the context. The role of the English-medium instruction policy, therefore, is significant as a mediating factor, which influences students’ motivation on the one hand and their speaking achievement on the other hand.

The use of group reading helps learners become more actively engaged in meaning making through exchanging interpretations of texts. However, relatively little published research has focused specially on the process of how learners interact with each other to read and to interpret texts in the local context. The present study therefore aims to explore how Taiwanese junior college EFL learners constructed meaning from texts while participating in peer-led story discussions. Participants were grouped into 12 heterogeneous groups, each of which consisted of four second-year students with different levels of reading ability. They read eight simplified short stories of between 600-700 headwords over a period of eight weeks. Transcribed audiotapes of four representative discussions served as the major data source and were analyzed using Rosenblatt’s (1994) definition of efferent and aesthetic transactions. Interviews and students’ reading logs were collected to find out the focus group students’ reading behaviors during the two-month long study. The findings revealed that the participants consistently moved beyond facts to critically examine the ideas given and became aesthetically involved in the text to develop reflective thoughts. By gaining new thoughts that they could not obtain while reading alone, the EFL learners helped each other extend their thinking and venture more deeply into what they read.

This paper intends to evaluate an academic writing course for ESL learners with the aid of technology. Such a course is based on an integrated model that draws strength from both the model of writing as a process and as a social construct. Forty-one learners from various Asian language backgrounds attended the course in a large Midwestern American university. Details of how the students completed their research paper during the course are described, and evaluation of the course is done through a questionnaire investigating the students’ perceptions about the usefulness of the elements involved in the writing process, a paired samples t-test of the students’ pre- and post-course writing, and a qualitative analysis of the students’ reflective ideas on how the course benefits them. The result of the t-test (t=2.316, p<0.05) indicates that the students did improve their writing competence as a result of taking the course, and the analysis of the questionnaire shows that most of the students had positive opinions of the course. Therefore, it is believed that the course incorporating the integrated model has achieved the goal of helping ESL learners improve their competence and confidence in academic writing, which will enable them to cope successfully with future writing tasks in their academic disciplines.

This study investigates the different linguistic effects that independent (writing-only) and integrated (reading-to-write) tasks have on adolescent English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ writing performance. An automated tool, Coh-Metrix, is employed to examine how productive skills are affected by the two types of tasks. In a 2x2x2 study design, 122 randomly assigned 11th-grade EFL students took both independent and integrated writing assessments. The results reveal that the two types of writing tasks produced submissions from students that were significantly different in their lexical sophistication, cohesion, and syntactic complexity. The present study highlights the importance of task type and of a learner’s language proficiency when examining writing test performance. In particular, on the integrated task, high-proficiency test-takers were able to produce texts that were more lexically and syntactically sophisticated, as well as more cohesive, than low-proficiency test-takers.